Inside View

10 Questions from Sunday Papers

TAKING A BREAK from digging, filling, painting and cleaning, I've spotted 10 questions arising from a quick reading of the Sunday papers.

Black Tat Contest

The ever-lovely Ramona Dixon (a confirmed Flickr fraud) shares her snaps from the Black Tat Contest. The world needs more black tats made with orange highlights.

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See more Flickr frauds in the discussion group.

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Reformat iPod

MONTHS AGO, IBM podcaster Ben Edwards was a little surprised when I told him I carry around an iPod with most of its 20 GB space occupied with data. After our conversation, I started looking into how I have more content on my iPod than in any other device that I carry with me. I discovered that the iPod is not deleting content that I erase through Windows. I think this happened because I started synching the iPod with different programs and with different operating systems. After three years of use, I could not add anything else to my faithful iPod. I explored ways to reformat the iPod because I couldn't survive without renewing my portable music collection. I reformatted it using my Windows XP laptop by plugging it into my USB port and--without opening iTunes--scrolled down the drives shown in Windows Explorer. I found my iPod displayed, right-clicked on it, clicked Format, and that did the job. I also reformatted my iPod using a command available in XPlay, an add-on Explorer-like program from Media Four. That worked too. I've talked with others who have used the iPod updater "Restore" option. That also scrubs all data from the iPod and reformats its hard drive. 

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Get the iPod update from www.apple.com/ipod/download/.
Now I use Anapod Explorer to control stuff on my iPod. Recommended.

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How foreigners feel about Ireland

A VISITOR asked Google, "How do the Irish people make foreigners feel when they come to Ireland?" Google has more than a million answers but two bloggers finish at the top of the search engine results. One of them is Twenty Major. The third result is Indymedia. If you read blogs, you know the story of the 1000 Welcomes is told differently by members of the online community.

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Opinions, Connections, Conversations

WHEN I HANDED over my Irish census form, I wondered if five years from now the broadband question will be replaced by a blog question. "Do you have a blog?" Sabeer Bhatia, the inventor of Hotmail, says, "Just as everybody has an e-mail account today, everybody will have a blog in five years." He's put his finger on something that is true about talkative Ireland. In talkative Ireland, everybody has a right to have an opinion expressed to Joe Duffy. In the Bebo Republic of Ireland, people have an uncontrollable urge to connect and converse with others. This is such a basic urge that many consider it to be a basic right. If this is true, then RTE journalism needs to be as much about feedback as it is about presentation. Census takers in five years' time might be asking through which URL we take our news because many analysts believe once more than half of the population is served by broadband, people will start moving from broadcast information to broadband information. Making the move gives you access to a place where you enjoy the conversational side of the news. If you're reading this online, you're there already.

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Nokia Podcasting Software Means S60 v3

IF YOU WANT podcasts delivered directly to your Nokia phone, you should have a flat data charge package or a wi-fi S60 phone. Above all else, you need the third edition of a Nokia Series 60 phone. This means the Nokia N80 instad of the N70 (although the N71 might be a S60 Third Edition device). Phones running the Third Edition of the S60 (formerly Series 60) smartphone platform use Symbian OS version 9. Previous versions of Series 60 were based on Symbian 8, which is not binary-compatible. That means software applications written for previous versions of Series 60 probably won't work on phones with the new S60 Third Edition.

Real Italian

WHILE LIVING in Kilkenny, we ate at Italian Connection at least once a month because of its authentic Italian cuisine.  You can get this same authenticity Italian treatment at Dunne & Crescenzi, the Dublin coffee stop I frequent. When visiting Sicily, we noted the things you would never find on an Italian pizza plus we discovered the Italians have stricter animal care laws than the Irish. Some other very Italian things.

Most influential delicious

NEW SOCIAL networking features at del.icio.us means you can set up a "network" page (like a page filled with those tagging "irishblogs") that shows all links from other Irish del.icio.us accounts that you want to track. The network tab lets you easily share links inside your network with a single-click. You can get all these things by individually setting up query strings as RSS feeds. Brady Forrest is "subscribed to the feeds of several delicious users in my RSS reader and I've been able to send people links using the 'for:' tag".

Feed Henry

AT THURSDAY'S Web 2.0 event in Dublin, TSSG wouldn't say much about Henry. "What we can say is that it is a system for feeds (RSS, Atom etc.) which aims to make your reading list work as it should from wherever you read it, on any device and with any client". To make the cloud more relevant, Henry needs to be sitting on relevant feeds. If you have a feed others should read, enter your feed's URL and feed Henry. If you don't but you're interested in this idea, you should tell TSSG your name and e-mail address and you'll get more stuff when Henry goes live.

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Bonus Link: Paul Watson's Flickr contact list. It contains more names than any Bebo listing I've seen.

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100m on Skype

SKYPE, the fastest-growing Internet communication service in the world, notched up its 100,000,000th user today and because the service has proven to be robust, it's the one my mom uses to call me from the States to Ireland. Mom does not have a computer. She pays nothing for the call. She rings my SkypeIn number. You can get Skype in 27 languages. I've never seen more than 3.7m people online with Skype at any one time and I'm starting to think that some of the 100m users are SkypeIn accounts. If 100m Skype IDs exist, it's remarkable that so few of them are online at once. That's what Jaanus seems to say in his comment on Wagstaff's post.

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Jeremy Wagstaff -- "Skype's 100 Million: Where the Hell Are They?"

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